6 ms·
I remember intentionally writing an awful text editor. A guy had a kid who had severe learning difficulties and motor problems. However he loved typing into t
by LandR 6y ago
I remember intentionally writing an awful text editor.
A guy had a kid who had severe learning difficulties and motor problems. However he loved typing into the computer but would get frustrated if he hit say alt and would go to the menu, or held a key down too long and get duplicates. Stuff like that. Or would accidentally close it etc.
So i wrote the worlds worst text editor, it would intercept all key presses so that nothing would be handled that would result in the cursor leaving the editor. You could hold down keys as long as you want and would only get one character, same with delete. It also made a type wtiter type noise on every key press. Pretty sure i had timing as well so if you pushed the same key twice quickly you would only get one character output.
It had no menu bar and opened full screen and would start up wherever you left it text wise.
Testing it would drive me mental. It was so frustrating to use! I can't even remember how you exited it as im pretty sure i was intercepting ctrl alt delete. This was windows xp days.
The kid liked it though!
- jimmaswell 6y agoIntercepting ctrl alt delete is supposed to be impossible, though.
- maccard 6y agoStackoverflow to the rescue - https://stackoverflow.com/a/2435686/723918 https://stackoverflow.com/a/2435686/723918 You don't need to actually stop ctrl alt del, you just need to stop it from opening task manager!
- LandR 6y agoAt that time i was working with kernel hooks a lot. Maybe i used that. I remember even having code to hide stuff from appearing in task manager, or hide files from showing up in file explorer. I remember debugging this stuff was painful, when it didn't work you got the BSOD. Be interested to know how much of these techniques could work on win 7/10. Im guessing not at all.
- sedatk 6y agoDid the kid accidentally press Ctrl+Alt+Del together so many times that it was an issue to be addressed with a custom kernel driver? It sounds a bit like an overkill. The key combination was intentionally picked to avoid accidental presses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control-Alt-Delete#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control-Alt-Delete#History
- alpaca128 6y agoIt doesn't necessarily need to be intercepted. I remember on Windows 7 I managed to create a small program which opened a screen-filling window with the close button disabled and the "always on top" property. I could press Ctrl+Alt+Del as much as I wanted, the task manager always opened behind my program's window and so was pretty useless. Then again Windows 7 still had some quirks here and there, maybe it's different now.
- barrkel 6y agoCtrl-Alt-Del, from the old NT days, was a Secure Attention Sequence, theoretically not interceptable short of a kernel driver, and took you to a separate desktop. NT supported separate desktops, but they're not like virtual monitors you see today; they're more like separate virtual ttys in the Linux console sense, entirely separate desktops with wholly detached window environments running on them. That's where the lock screen lived, and where Ctrl-Alt-Del took you to. Windows 7 probably changed that somewhat. I know the lock screen in Windows 10 is super buggy wrt customisation.
- frosted-flakes 6y agoCtrl+Alt+Del doesn't open Task Manager directly, it opens a separate full-screen menu that looks like the login screen with options for shutting down, logging out, or opening Task Manager. It's been this way at least since Windows 7, but probably earlier.
- wolfgang42 6y agoYou’d think, but I know of one POS system (in both senses of the term) that managed to do it accidentally. [Edit: on Windows 7, which you’d think would be able to handle stuff like this.] If you scanned a UPC into the quantity field it would lock up the entire OS, to the point that even Ctrl+Alt+Del was ignored and you had to hard-reboot the system. After years of this they finally gave us a patch that still froze the computer, but C+A+D would at least interrupt it. I never did work out how they managed to bungle things that badly.
- o-__-o 6y agoControl alt del triggers an interrupt. If it is unhandled then nothing happens. If your OS crashes there is nothing to catch interrupts. Maybe the patch fixed the OS so the interrupt handler remains responsive. This is a common problem for a RTOS
- wolfgang42 6y agoThis was on Windows 7. (I thought I’d mentioned that, but I guess I forgot.)
- Impossible 6y agoThis is a great lesson in accessibility and building the right product for a specific user. While you call it "awful" you ended up with something extremely accessible that made your user happy. This is an extreme example, but there is a lot to learn from this